Jefferson & Agrarianism

Whether or not all of Jane Jacobs’s diagnosis of the metropolis sickness applies to large-scale sprawl in Florida, some of her advice can still enable us to understand why we should control our size, discourage cookie-cutter and cul de sac neighborhood building, and revitalize our quiet suburbs and abandoned urban districts to transform our car world into a foot world. However, before we jump to why we must change, we must understand how we got to this point. 

As surprising as it sounds, before the United States became a nation, the first settlers of the New World had predilections for the suburban life style we had today. It started with the Puritans, who had a traditional, Feudal outlook on wealth. They didn’t believe everyone was equal; their social order was quite hierarchical. Those who have more money and a higher position were allotted more land. All land was distributed according to this hierarchy. Also, the 1950s suburban flight was not the first “escape” that occurred on our continent because the mass emigration could be considered “a reenactment of the same drama that had brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth Harbor” (Kunstler, Geography 39).  The Pilgrims, besides escaping persecution, abandoned the industrial cities, and instead they dreamed of a better, more agrarian life on their “City upon A Hill.” Their intentions were also of course, religious, for they believed their old world was filled with human depravity, and nature appealed to them. 

In the late 18^th century, when the United States consisted of only thirteen colonies, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and James Madison had a vision of America as a large expanse of land on which people could become self-sufficient farmers and support an agricultural economy. When America dealt with its first polarization in politics, Jefferson, an Anti-Federalist, unlike his Federalist industry-loving, growth-supporting counterpart, Alexander Hamilton, hoped his citizens would have the chance to live closer to nature and still be entitled to possessions like the grand country estate. Jefferson’s dream of America would be ideal in today’s conditions, especially with our problems of fuel dependence and climate change vulnerability. Also, living the pastoral life articulated in his vision, “equated with a democratic economy, in which homeownership equals participation” (Duany 40).